About this time last year, did a glass engraving job. Something we don't do, awards. It was a pain in the butt then. Small text, letters not appearing, then magically appearing (if you have engraved glass, you know what I'm talking about), all the "fun" things that go along with glass engraving. Really fought that job back then.

A call came in about a month ago, people wanted to do the same thing. Great, I have all the settings (still in my job control software), I have all the fixtures. Okay, we'll do it.

Ordered the glass. First delivery date of the glass to us. Missed. Called, sorry, it's going out in a few days. Missed that. Called again. Got new date. Missed that. Finally got a tracking number, stuff is due in Thursday afternoon. Comes in, great, we have a whopping 1 day to get it done unless we do it on the weekend. Thanks for that. No ability to screw something up and get some more in, only a couple of extras. Great, thanks for that too. Nothing like the pressure of having no way to replace the items and figuring it all out at the same time.

Engrave the first one. Not even close to working. After 2 hours of working on the same sample, trying to get a good, clean mark on small letters, I went home, way past quitting time. Great, I'll pick it up in the morning with fresh thoughts.

Wrong. 3 hours later, I finally get the magical combination of settings and technique figure out. It's now 10 hours later (or something like that) and I'm still working on the stupid things.

If I EVER think about taking a glass job to engrave, someone, please, do me the favor and smack the back of my head and ask "what are you thinking?".

Have I mentioned I hate glass?

I hate glass.

(where is that brochure for that sand carving setup????????)